How Structural Racism at Regional Planning Agencies Hurts Cities
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Your regional planning agency is probably set up to favor the suburbs.
Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Sprawl
Why the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction Has Got to Go
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The mortgage interest deduction costs the federal government more than all rental subsidies combined. All that money promotes sprawl by encouraging people to buy more house, while transferring wealth to the upper tiers of the income ladder.
Reversing Sun Belt Growth Model, Memphis Looks to Shrink Its Footprint
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Like many Sun Belt cities, Memphis owes its population growth over the last several decades to outward expansion. Since 1998 alone, the city has overseen 15 annexations, occupying a larger footprint than Chicago. But now the city believes that some of its farthest flung territory is more liability than asset.
Sprawl Is a Global Problem
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Sprawl isn’t just a problem in car-centric America. Even cities with the world’s best transit systems are surrounded by suburbs with poor transit access, according to a new report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. As billions of people migrate from rural to metropolitan areas in the next few decades, these growth patterns threaten to maroon people without […]
What the Equality of Opportunity Project Actually Says About Commuting
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With their powerful results, the studies coming out of the Equality of Opportunity Project, led by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, have become an important touchstone for journalists and transportation policy advisers. In their 2014 [PDF] and 2015 [PDF] studies, Chetty and Hendren show that place matters for low-income families. When low-income families have the […]
McMansions Fading Away?
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Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.” The […]